The present invention relates to a switched-capacitor filter (SCF) including switches, capacitors and an operational amplifier or amplifiers and, more particularly, to a variable switched-capacitor filter (VSCF) capable of changing the filter characteristic thereof.
A typical application of a VSCF is to an automatic line equalizer installed on a digital transmission path. There the power equalizer, commonly designated as a ".sqroot.f equalizer" because transmission loss increases dramatically as the frequency increases, is designed to minimize intersymbol interference by the application of a variable switched-capacitor filter circuit or ".sqroot.f filter". Such a VSCF can readily be manufactured in a large-scale integrated circuit configuration so that the automatic line equalizer using the VSCF can be provided in desirably small dimensions. An example of such automatic line equalizers implemented by conventional VSCFs is disclosed in a paper entitled "A CMOS Switched-Capacitor Variable Line Equalizer", by T. Suzuki et al in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuit, Vol. SC-18, No. 6, December 1983, pages 700 to 706. The disclosed conventional VSCF, however, has disadvantages that substantial waveform distortions take place at the time of selective capacitor switching because the variable filter characteristic of the VSCF is discrete. The distortions result in an undesirable error rate in the transmitted data. In a two-wire communication system, for example, a transmitting mode and a receiving mode must be set up alternately with each other so that level detection is effected during the receiving mode operation and selective capacitor switching in each capacitor group is effected during the transmitting mode operation (in which a .sqroot.f equalizer implemented by an SCF is not used). This frees the equalizer output from the influence of the waveform distortions attributable to the selective capacitor switching. In a four-wire communication system, however, the transmitting mode and the receiving mode occur simultaneously so that the SCF .sqroot.f equalizer is always in operation. As a result, the equalizer output inevitably has the waveform distortions due to the selective capacitor switching.